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Australian psychiatrists have led the biggest-ever worldwide study into youth mental health, finding that young people’s psychological health has “entered a dangerous phase” amid economic insecurity and political and technological changes that have young people feeling marginalised and cast adrift.

The incidence of mental ill-health in young people in Australia has risen by 50% in the past 15 years and has further risen alarmingly steeply since the Covid-19 pandemic, especially among teenage girls, such that almost 50 % of women aged between 16 and 24 report experiencing a mental health disorder. Yet the sector is drastically underfunded and neglected.

“There is no doubt that this is the most serious piece of work on this subject ever compiled,” said psychiatrist Pat McGorry, who led the five-year-long international research study published in The Lancet.

“We’ve assembled all the evidencn trouble in terms of its ability to safeguard the mental health of young people as they make the transition from childhood to adulthood. So, this has to be social and economic forces that are doing this.”

e and worked out, is this a real phenomenon, or is it just more awareness? But it’s very clearly real and solid.When you see a rise of that extent, over quite a short period, we’ve got to understand what’s changed in society to actually to bring this about. The conclusion is that society is i

The report finds there is “worldwide neglect of mental illness due to stigma and discrimination within health care and medical research” and warns that “cohesion and prosperity of societies around the world are at risk and not limited to health outcomes alone”.

Lack of Resources

Australia is second only to the United States in rising mental ill-health trends, and suicide is the leading cause of death among people aged 15–44 years in this country. Mental health is critically underfunded in Australia compared to its prevalence. The Royal Australia New Zealand College of Psychiatry recently estimated that the nation’s psychiatry workforce meets only 56% of the national demand in mental health services.

The situation is even more dire for young people. There are very few public adolescent mental health beds, a virtual total absence of publicly available care in the community, Headspace early intervention clinics have enormous wait lists, and private psychiatry and psychology are prohibitively expensive and inaccessible for many.

Compared to the $40 billion a year spent on about 600,000 Australians with a physical disability, only about $11 billion a year in total is spent on over 5 million people with a mental illness. Australia spends less than 7% of its health budget on mental health, but the suite of conditions is responsible for 15 to 20% of the health burden to society.

“If this were happening in any other health domain, there would be very dramatic action taken to respond to this public health crisis,” said Professor McGorry. The Lancet report finds that the mental ill-health of young people is “the largest and most rapidly growing cause of disability and lost human potential and productivity across the lifespan” globally, and Australia is hard-hit.

It identifies rising inter-generational inequality, unregulated social media, wage theft, insecurity of employment, and concerns over climate change, as well as the long tail impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, as “megatrends” that are inflicting deep and widespread psychological distress and trauma within societies among young people.

“The highly correlated domains of distress, diagnosable episodes of mental ill health with a need for care, and more severe, sustained, or recurrent forms of mental illness are at an all-time high,” the paper authored by psychiatrists and academics around the world said.

“Young people are showing the most serious warning signs and symptoms of a society and a world that is in serious trouble.”

Professor McGorry said that despite the escalating crisis of mental ill-health, especially in young people, the nation was failing to respond at the scale required or in a coordinated manner. “We’re not doing anything to boost the strength or capacity, or the effectiveness, of the youth mental health system,” he said.

“The kind of discrimination, in a funding sense, against the mentally ill means that only 50% of people with mental illness get access to any treatment, and only 15% of that treatment is of acceptable quality, so it’s terrible.

“And under the radar, the public is simmering about this issue. If you talk to any family and anyone that’s trying to access mental health care, they’ve had terrible difficulty.

“Yet this is not a wicked problem. We could fix this. There are models of care that would, over time, turn this around, very dramatically.

“We want to see this become a number one health priority. Mental health has always been the poor cousin. This crisis is not going to be reversed overnight, and it’s going to take a political consensus to do so, but while we’re dealing with this rising tide, we’ve got to actually help the casualties, which are two out of five young people.”

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Republished with thanks to the Australian Prayer Network. Image courtesy of Adobe.